Statistics without the agonizing pain

Matthew Brett

Standing on the YouTube channels of giants

With thanks to John Rauser: Statistics Without the Agonizing Pain

Assertion

Teaching statistics by way of mathematics is like teaching philosophy by way of ancient Greek

(Paraphrased from Wallis and Roberts (1956)).

Epicycles

Cobb (2007)

A problem

Our data

From Mosquito, beer dataset.

beers
array([14, 33, 27, 11, 12, 27, 26, 25, 27, 27, 22, 36, 37,  3, 23,  7, 25,
       17, 36, 31, 30, 22, 20, 29, 23])
waters
array([33, 23, 23, 13, 24,  8,  4, 21, 24, 21, 26, 27, 22, 21, 25, 20,  7,
        3])

Distributions

Means and difference

Mean of beer values is: 23.60
Mean of water values is: 19.17
Mean difference is: 4.43

The null hypothesis

Null means “not any”.

Define a world in which the difference of interest is set to zero.

The two samples have been drawn from the same underlying population.

Or:

There is not any difference in the population from which beer has been drawn, and the population from which water has been drawn.

The t-test.

A reasonable reaction

Read more

Bibliography

Cobb, George W. 2007. “The Introductory Statistics Course: A Ptolemaic Curriculum?” Technology Innovations in Statistics Education 1 (1).
Wallis, Wilson Allen, and Harry V Roberts. 1956. Statistics, a New Approach. New York: The Free Press.